The Botany of Desire

Every schoolchild learns about the mutually beneficial dance of honeybees and flowers: The bee collects nectar and pollen to make honey and, in the process, spreads the flowers' genes far and wide. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal relationship.

Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

Every year, the average American eats 33 pounds of cheese (triple what we ate in 1970) and 70 pounds of sugar (about 22 teaspoons a day). We ingest 8,500 milligrams of salt a day, double the recommended amount, and almost none of that comes from the shakers on our table. It comes from processed food. It’s no wonder, then, that one in three adults, and one in five kids, is clinically obese.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

"What should we have for dinner?" To one degree or another, this simple question assails any creature faced with a wide choice of things to eat. Anthropologists call it the omnivore's dilemma. Choosing from among the countless potential foods nature offers, humans have had to learn what is safe, and what isn't. Today, as America confronts what can only be described as a national eating disorder, the omnivore's dilemma has returned with an atavistic vengeance.

Salt: A World History

So much of our human body is made up of salt that we'd be dead without it. The fine balance of nature, the trade of salt as a currency of many nations and empires, the theme of a popular Shakespearean play...Salt is best selling author Mark Kurlansky's story of the only rock we eat.

Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation

In Cooked, Michael Pollan explores the previously uncharted territory of his own kitchen. Here, he discovers the enduring power of the four classical elements - fire, water, air, and earth - to transform the stuff of nature into delicious things to eat and drink. Apprenticing himself to a succession of culinary masters, Pollan learns how to grill with fire, cook with liquid, bake bread, and ferment everything from cheese to beer. In the course of his journey, he discovers that the cook occupies a special place in the world....

Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

Famed investigative journalist Eric Schlosser digs deep to uncover secrets about the management of America's nuclear arsenal. A groundbreaking account of accidents, near misses, extraordinary heroism, and technological breakthroughs, Command and Control explores the dilemma that has existed since the dawn of the nuclear age: How do you deploy weapons of mass destruction without being destroyed by them? That question has never been resolved - and Schlosser reveals how the combination of human fallibility and technological complexity still poses a grave risk to mankind.

Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time

Redefining our traditional understanding of the New Deal, Fear Itself finally examines this pivotal American era through a sweeping international lens that juxtaposes a struggling democracy with enticing ideologies like Fascism and Communism. Ira Katznelson, "a towering figure in the study of American and European history" (Cornel West), boldly asserts that, during the 1930s and 1940s, American democracy was rescued yet distorted by a unified band of southern lawmakers who safeguarded racial segregation as they built a new national state to manage capitalism and assert global power.

History Decoded: The Ten Greatest Conspiracies of All Time

Adapted from Decoded, Meltzer's hit show on the History network, History Decoded explores many fascinating and unexplained questions. Is Fort Knox empty? Why was Hitler so intent on capturing the Roman "Spear of Destiny"? What's the government hiding in Area 51? Where did the Confederacy's $19 million in gold and silver go at the end of the Civil War? Did Lee Harvey Oswald really act alone?

No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller

No One Would Listen is the exclusive story of the Harry Markopolos-lead investigation into Bernie Madoff and his $65 billion Ponzi scheme. While a lot has been written about Madoff's scam, few actually know how Markopolos and his team - affectionately called "the Fox Hounds" by Markopolos himself - uncovered what Madoff was doing years before this financial disaster reached its pinnacle. Unfortunately, no one listened, until the damage of the world's largest financial fraud ever was irreversible.

Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body's Most Underrated Organ

Our gut is almost as important to us as our brain, yet we know very little about how it works. Gut: The Inside Story is an entertaining, informative tour of the digestive system from the moment we raise a tasty morsel to our lips until the moment our body surrenders the remnants to the toilet bowl. No topic is too lowly for the author's wonder and admiration, from the careful choreography of breaking wind to the precise internal communication required for a cleansing vomit.

Food: A Cultural Culinary History

Eating is an indispensable human activity. As a result, whether we realize it or not, the drive to obtain food has been a major catalyst across all of history, from prehistoric times to the present. Epicure Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin said it best: "Gastronomy governs the whole life of man."

The Few: The American "Knights of the Air" Who Risked Everything to Fight in the Battle of Britain

World War II had been raging for nearly a year. Hitler was now planning an invasion of England to seal Europe's fate. Though the United States was still neutral, a few Americans decided they couldn't remain on the sidelines. They joined Britain's Royal Air Force - with the future of civilization hanging in the balance. The Few tells the dramatic story of these Americans who defied their own country's neutrality laws and risked their very citizenship to fight side-by-side with England's finest pilots.

Second Nature: A Gardener's Education

In his articles and in best-selling books such as The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan has established himself as one of our most important and beloved writers on modern man's place in the natural world. A new literary classic, Second Nature has become a manifesto not just for gardeners but for environmentalists everywhere.

The Hoarder in You: How to Live a Happier, Healthier, Uncluttered Life

The Hoarder in You provides practical advice for decluttering and organizing, including how to tame the emotional pull of acquiring additional things, make order out of chaos by getting a handle on clutter, and create an organizational system that reduces stress and anxiety. Dr. Zasio also shares some of the most serious cases of hoarding that she’s encountered, and explains how we can learn from these extreme examples - no matter where we are on the hoarding continuum.

Beyond Valor: World War II's Ranger and Airborne Veterans Reveal the Heart of Combat

Previous books have promised to describe the combat experience of the World War II GI, but there has never been a book like Patrick O'Donnell's Beyond Valor. Here is the first combat history of the war in Europe in the words of the men themselves, and perhaps the most honest and brutal account of combat possible.

Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon’s Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart

Extraordinary things happen when we harness the power of both the brain and the heart. Growing up in the high desert of California, Jim Doty was poor, living with an alcoholic father and a mother chronically depressed and paralyzed by a stroke. Today he is the director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University, of which the Dalai Lama is a founding benefactor.

Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig

As historian Mark Essig reveals in Lesser Beasts, swine have such a bad reputation for precisely the same reasons they are so valuable as a source of food: they are intelligent, self-sufficient, and omnivorous. What's more, he argues, we ignore our historic partnership with these astonishing animals at our peril.

Atlas Shrugged

This is the story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world - and did. Is he a destroyer or a liberator? Why does he fight his hardest battle not against his enemies, but against the woman he loves? Tremendous in scope, breathtaking in its suspense, Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rand's magnum opus and launched an ideology and a movement. With the publication of this work in 1957, Rand gained an instant following and became a phenomenon. Atlas Shrugged emerged as a premier moral apologia for capitalism, a defense that had an electrifying effect on millions of readers (and now listeners) who had never heard capitalism defended in other than technical terms.

The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

The Element shows the vital need to enhance creativity and innovation by thinking differently about human resources and imagination. It is an essential strategy for transforming education, business, and communities to meet the challenges of living and succeeding in the 21st century.

Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha

"Believing that something is wrong with us is a deep and tenacious suffering," says Tara Brach at the start of this illuminating book. This suffering emerges in crippling self-judgments and conflicts in our relationships, in addictions and perfectionism, in loneliness and overwork - all the forces that keep our lives constricted and unfulfilled. Radical Acceptance offers a path to freedom, including the day-to-day practical guidance developed over Dr. Brach's 20 years of work with therapy clients and Buddhist students.

Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference

Most of us want to make a difference. We donate our time and money to charities and causes we deem worthy, choose careers we consider meaningful, and patronize businesses and buy products we believe make the world a better place. Unfortunately we often base these decisions on assumptions and emotions rather than facts. As a result even our best intentions often lead to ineffective - and sometimes downright harmful - outcomes. How can we do better?

The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills

Daniel Coyle spent the last few years traveling around the world and meeting with top coaches, teachers, and neurologists in order to unlock the secret of how greatness happens. Now he has taken his groundbreaking research and boiled it down to the essentials: 52 simple, proven rules for developing and growing talent in sports, art, music, business, or just about anything.

The Art of Living

With this audiobook, the listener will become a student of Bob Proctor as he teaches lessons and presents jewels of wisdom on living an extraordinary life. Listeners will marvel at Proctor's miraculous way of disseminating his decades of business wisdom into easy-to-understand parables and learn lessons on what our creative faculties are and how to use them, why we need to unlearn most of the false beliefs we've been indoctrinated with our whole lives, and how our intellects have the ability not only to put us ahead in life but also to be our biggest detriment.

The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry

The irascible A. J. Fikry, owner of Island Books - the only bookstore on Alice Island - has already lost his wife. Now his most prized possession, a rare book, has been stolen from right under his nose in the most embarrassing of circumstances. The store itself, it seems, will be next to go. One night upon closing, he discovers a toddler in his children’s section with a note from her mother pinned to her Elmo doll: I want Maya to grow up in a place with books and among people who care about such kinds of things. I love her very much, but I can no longer take care of her.

Audible Editor Reviews

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." These are the first words of Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. Scott Brick narrates these opening sentences with slowly paced emphasis and a nicely modulated deftness, with a hint of coyness. The coyness is Pollan's. For what else can one eat but food? And why does eating need a manifesto? Pollan answers that we increasing do not eat food (whole food) but rather consume processed "food products". We are in "The Age of Nutritionism". Pollan's In Defense of Food is a richly developed polemic against the unhealthful food culture that the ideology of nurtitionism represents. The book is as well a de facto manual for growing and eating our way out of it.

Brick is a compelling spokesman for Pollan's argument. He brings to In Defense of Food a voice in the baritone-to-tenor range, with an always on-the-mark sonic focus matched with a point of expressive emphasis that constantly shifts, as Brick makes his flawless and fluent runs up and down and within his octave ranges. Brick's doing all of this can only be achieved by natural talent, disciplined training, and smart reading  joined by a mastery of a quite large array of narrative and expressive skills.

It is very likely that somewhere in some academic haven there are specific concepts and a precise language that could quantify and describe what goes on with Brick's narrative voice. In the end, though, it all comes down to art. Using, with apologies, an extended metaphor, that of jazz: Brick picks up his axe (saxophone), fingering the notes and changing the octaves with the keys; with his fine set of chops (lips) applies the pressure onto the sax's mouth piece and reed, and, modulating the breath and applying nuances of feeling and expression, blows -- that is, in jazz-speak -- plays. The well-argued and passionate polemic that is In Defense of Food is, in this audio production, a show piece showcasing Scott Brick's narrative range and dexterity. David Chasey

Publisher's Summary

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." These simple words go to the heart of Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, the well-considered answers he provides to the questions posed in the bestselling The Omnivore's Dilemma. Humans used to know how to eat well, Pollan argues. But the balanced dietary lessons that were once passed down through generations have been confused, complicated, and distorted by food industry marketers, nutritional scientists, and journalists-all of whom have much to gain from our dietary confusion. As a result, we face today a complex culinary landscape dense with bad advice and foods that are not "real." These "edible food-like substances" are often packaged with labels bearing health claims that are typically false or misleading. Indeed, real food is fast disappearing from the marketplace, to be replaced by "nutrients," and plain old eating by an obsession with nutrition that is, paradoxically, ruining our health, not to mention our meals. Michael Pollan's sensible and decidedly counterintuitive advice is: "Don't eat anything that your great-great grandmother would not recognize as food."

In looking toward traditional diets the world over, as well as the foods our families-and regions-historically enjoyed, we can recover a more balanced, reasonable, and pleasurable approach to food. Michael Pollan's bracing and eloquent manifesto shows us how we might start making thoughtful food choices that will enrich our lives and enlarge our sense of what it means to be healthy.

What the Critics Say

"[Narrator] Scott Brick brings the necessary energy, pacing, and articulation to what promises to be one of this year's most popular and provocative titles.... Brick carries this manifesto against nutrition science and food manufacturers with the voice of indictment - unflinching, unflagging, and fired by conviction." (AudioFile)

After years of surging insulin resistance and the accompanying host of metabolic disorder symptoms (high cholesterol, high triglycerides, high blood sugar) I now follow the simple rules in this book. I still eat meat but a tiny fraction of what I ate for my first 50 years. I eat mostly plants, not too much. I avoid packaged, processed food. I've lost 100 pounds, LDL went from 285 to 83 and my insulin resistance has vanished. This book has saved my life, seriously.

Many nutrition books aspire to show you insight on your body chemistry and its link to the food you eat. Fortunately this is not a book on nutrition, this is a book on "nutritionism". Most of this book explores the food industry and how the media, government, and nutritionists have corrupted what humans have been doing correctly for thousands of years, namely eating real FOOD. While Michael Pollan does show some points on what processed food is doing to our body, he mainly focuses on the misinformation we generally receive about food. He concludes with some diet advice a little more detailed than just "eat food&". The best part about his advice is it makes sense, common sense. It will make you say "I already knew that" but at the same time say "so why have I not been doing it?". This is the first book I have read(heard) by Michael Pollan but I plan on reading(hearing) more. The only downside you may find is the reading by Scott Brick. I have heard many books read by him and I am used to his style and actually enjoy it, but I can see some people finding it distracting. This is an EASY 5 stars, no reason not to buy it. (and no I'm not getting paid to say that lol)

This is the most down to earth (pardon the pun;-) and sensible diet book I have ever listened to. At the end, I thought "I can do this" and still enjoy my food. Scot Brick's dramatisation and pausing at just the moments when I needed to consider an important point, really made the listening easy and enjoyable. Bravo! Bravo!

This is a very informative, easy-to-listen-to book. An Omnivore's Dilemna is an excellent account of the writer's exploration of how food gets from the farm to the plate, and this book answers the question he most often received after publishing the first, "What should we eat?" Very pratical, realistic and soundly written, he discusses the nature of the food industry and food itself. Enjoyable and worthwhile.

I enjoyed the book, but if you haven't read The Omnivore's Dilemma, read it first - not as a prequel, but just because it's a more in depth discussion of our industrialized food system and how it's failing us. You may not be convinced of this by In Defense of Food, but you will be by The Omnivore's Dilemma.

If you have The Omnivore's Dilemma, this book is a bit like preaching to the choir, but still well worth the read.

Also, I hate to "dis" the narrator, but he distracts from the book. I've heard his narration of other books and enjoyed them, but they were all fiction. He put a little too much drama into his reading of this non-fiction book about food.

I really don't want to give this or any book a bad review because I'm usually not in the habit of criticizing others, but Michael Pollan's book which, I would enjoy if I read, was not so pleasant to listen to because of the overly exaggerated tone of the narrator. I'm sure Scott Brick is wonderful with fiction, but non-fiction with a continues sarcastic tone is really too much. For what it's worth, I recommend buying the book.

This book, "In Defense of Food," is galvanizing, offering a holistic re-orientation to the whole realm of food and all that's involved in it.

Pollan gives us a useful new villain, "nutritionalism" (a term previously coined by another author), which is our (and more so, "the pro's" - researchers, dieticians, etc)tendency to want to think of foods in terms of individual nutrients - carbs, protein, fat, micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, co-factors, enzymes, etc), and the omnipresent calorie. This is inculcated through our whole culture, and Pollan suggests it is a BARRIER. He suggests that ESCAPING that fragmented, malfunctioning mindset is our salvation, and offers holistic means of achieving the health and dietary peace that evades us.

(One very little hitch in all this gitalong: Though at each point along the way, Pollan guides the reader such that his various recommendations seem feasible at each step, with the reader nodding in agreement that yes, this is something I could do - at the very end (the VERY end) he picks up a huge amount of speed and arrives at the finish line a bit breathless - with the reader - well, THIS reader - thinking um, I'm not sure about this, you left me in the dust a little ways back there! But... I guess that's another book.)

Otherwise, excellent: brilliantly conceived, creatively researched, beautifully written. And the reading is simply top-notch, the pairing of book & reader is a marriage made in heaven. Scott Brick's delivery is as articulate, as accurate, as brisk, and as bitingly accusatory as David Hyde Pierce, while being as soothing, helpful, hopeful and compassionate as the movement of the text demands.

It is a big topic Pollan has taken on, in terms of the technical scope of the material as well as the social reach of his analysis, and I think he's done a marvelous job, really hit the nail on the head, or very nearly so. I have his other book, "Omnivore's Dilemma" in my library and can't wait to get to it next.

I really enjoyed listening the this book, partly because Scott Brick is one of my favorite narrators. This book has given me a new perspective on what I should consider to be food and what I should be eating. So much of what we eat is processed "food" and the author tries to connect the change in the Western diet with the increased levels of obesity and other health problems we see in society. The author has certainly convinced me to check labels more closely and to eat more fresh, non-processed food.